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Sci Tech
The wonder years
QUESTION: Why do we not remember much about our early childhood? In particular, the period from 0 to 5 years seems to be totally forgotten.
ANSWER 1: There are two main reasons why you cannot remember much about early childhood.
First, when children are born, they have very little in the way of developed cortex — the higher processing areas of the brain. These areas develop as you grow, with most of the major growth completed by the age of eight. Long-term memories all start in the hippocampus and ultimately end up in the temporal cortex (although there is still some debate on this process). Because these areas are not fully developed in young children, their early memories cannot be stored with great accuracy.
Secondly, if you have ever studied memory, you will know the things you remember come from the fact they have context and meaning. Children have less understanding of the context in which they live, so events tend to carry less meaning and consequently their brains do not retain them.
ANSWER 2: Few people can remember events in their lives before three or four years of age. Developmental explanations for childhood amnesia focus on the young child's cognitive limitations.
A promising explanation for childhood amnesia is the social interaction hypothesis. Adults use language to model and teach the child what autobiographical memory is, how to use it and why it is important. Accordingly autobiographical memory emerges after the appearance of language, as narrative memory is constructed through parent-child conversations about the past. Parental responsiveness to children's needs, including engagement in supportive talk about past, present and future events, influences this autobiographical memory.
Narrative memory first appears at about age two when children begin to talk about the past, but early memory narratives are sparse and usually fail to preserve the causal and temporal structure of complex events. Later, as adults, our attempts to remember may fail because early memories are incompatible with our new purposeful recall efforts.
New Scientist
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